“YOU don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” sang Joni Mitchell a generation ago. That lyric should resonate with many physical scientists who over the past few weeks have been lamenting the fall of Bell Labs in New Jersey, formerly the world’s premier industrial research laboratory.
Its star has been fading for two decades, but the knock-out blow came at the end of last year, when the merger of Bell Labs’ parent company Lucent Technologies with French company Alcatel subsumed Bell’s shrunken remains into the “Alcatel-Lucent research community”. The Bell Labs name remains, but it now employs just 1000, down from a peak of 25,000.
In its heyday – which lasted decades – Bell Labs had a reputation as a bastion of scientific excellence. To understand how it achieved this, and to grasp just how big a hole its demise has left, it is important to go back to its birth in 1925, as the central research group for the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, AT&T. Run as a private yet state-regulated monopoly, the company did everything from manufacturing telephone equipment to renting phones. Maintaining this service across a country the size of the US was a considerable challenge. At the same time it was pursuing new technologies, including the first system to synchronise sound with motion pictures, and early fax machines and televisions.
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All this meant learning more about the fundamentals of electronics, audio and communications, and it was here that Bell Labs excelled. Two years after it was founded, Bell Labs researcher Clinton Davisson observed electron diffraction, confirming that matter can behave like waves, for which he earned half of the 1937 Nobel prize in physics. Other early successes included Harry Nyquist’s explanation of thermal noise in electrical resistors, and Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves from the centre of the galaxy. In later years Bell Labs scientists made key contributions to solid-state physics, invented the transistor, developed information theory and discovered the cosmic microwave background.
Research wasn’t Bell Labs’ only area of expertise: the vast majority of employees were engineers whose job was to develop, test and perfect new technologies. It became the global centre of excellence in telecommunications technology, consulted by telephone authorities around the world.
What, then, was the key to its success? A large part of it was the way it encouraged its employees to strive for great ideas and tackle the toughest problems. The company trained technical managers to inspire staff with ideas rather than meddle with details, and could afford to have multiple teams try different approaches at once. No doubt it also benefited from the security of working for a regulated monopoly insulated from the whims of the marketplace.
The labs’ approach was far from flawless, though. Even Bell’s best managers could pick the wrong projects, such as video telephones nobody wanted to buy. And like a massive battleship, it could be slow to turn towards a new technology. Yet once it focused on a new idea, Bell could overpower problems that foxed everyone else. It was Russian scientists who developed the first semiconductor laser that could operate at room temperature, but it was Bell Labs that painstakingly spent years extending the laser’s lifetime from the fleeting seconds the Russians had achieved to the million hours needed to run fibre-optic networks. Furthermore, Bell technology was built to last: I still use a 30-year-old Bell phone at home. Its old-fashioned dial is cumbersome, but the sturdy design has outlasted much newer and fancier models.
Big companies around the world nurtured their own smaller versions of the Bell model. Some became legends in their own right, like the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, famed for key developments in computers and networking. Yet many faltered, victims of mismanagement or a failure to produce hoped-for benefits.
Eventually Bell’s success ended too. After years of litigation, AT&T spun off its regional telephone service as seven separate companies in 1984, ending the decades of cosy monopoly. A dozen years later, it spun off most of Bell Labs along with its equipment division as Lucent Technologies, which initially prospered but then stumbled badly, shrinking from a peak of 160,000 employees to 30,500 before merging with Alcatel. Then in 2002 Bell Labs’ prestige took a major hit when star researcher Jan Hendrick Schön was found to have faked research results.
“Excellence is not part of modern business plans in the way it was at Bell Labs”
It will be missed – it already is. The greatest loss is not so much Bell’s vaunted basic research, but its unique ability to marshal teams of top technologists to transform bright ideas into effective technology. Those teams made it possible for us to hear someone speaking halfway around the world as clearly as if they were speaking next door. Today’s telecoms companies want to make those networks faster and cheaper, but excellence is not part of their business plans in the way it was at Bell Labs. Think about that the next time you’re pacing around trying to get decent reception on your cellphone.
